Blogging slow down

Sorry, my blogging of late has slowed down dramatically. Unfortunately, my back pain is back and in full force, so I just haven't had the energy to continue to blog. I'll be back as soon as this is under control.

Your children are a reflection

If you have ever wondered how you are doing in your life on your walk as a Jesus follower, you really don't have farther to look than your children. They reflect your values. They pick up on what is truly important to you and they disregard the fluff. Children have this innate ability to cut through the garbage of what we try to show our lives are about and really understand what is important. With all my problems and my own hang ups, one thing I have been able to teach my children is the idea of service. My son who is 8 understands that true joy comes from serving others. This kid wakes up every Sunday at 0445 to get dressed and ready and come to church so it can be setup in time for everybody else to come and have church. That's just one...he also thinks of others at all sorts of other times. Heck, when we fixed his Heelie wheel with a new aluminum one, I had to sit down and tell him not to offer to all his friends new wheels! Otherwise we'd be in the shop every night spinning more and more wheels!

The other thing he has picked up from me is an understanding of how things work. The other night, we were in the shop and he mentioned he'd like a BB gun and he was wondering if we could make one. So I discussed with him some designs I've seen to shoot the little plastic BBs where it is connected to shop air, there is a plug that serves as a vortex generator that spins the BBs around until they have sufficient velocity to exit the barrel and then they pop out. We discussed how that works and what parts we'd need. Well, last night he was thinking of how that all works and he was going through some of the spare parts we have. He found a length of 1/2" PVC pipe and a cap for it. He found the air nozzle for the compressor fit in the end perfectly, and if he jammed the cap on good it would shoot across the yard! So my 8-year-old built his own potato-type gun and spent the evening shooting it with his siblings. The best part is he understands safety and insisted everybody wore their safety glasses and were out of the line of fire.

Our children are watching us. They are not just watching what we say, but they are watching mostly what we do. They will emulate what they see us do since that is what is really important to us, not just what we say. Let's make sure our actions are appropriate for what we are saying. If we talk about serving others, are we actually serving others? If we talk about stewardship of everything we own, do we live like all our stuff is God's and we're just stewards of it?

Pumpkin knives

My kids all wanted a kids knife to carve their pumpkins with. I know I've seen them at the store before...these plastic handled things with a serrated edge to them. Since I have a metal shop and I play with metal occasionally, I agreed to help them make pumpkin knives. Each kid helped with each of the knives, and now they're excited! Pumpkin knives for everyone!!!

Just recorded

Real Time last night and what a fun show! It took a while to warm our guest up, but once he got started he didn't want to stop talking! Can't wait to edit this one and get it out there!

It made it!

I've been trying to get the picture to work, but I can't see it yet. It's pretty neat...the container we worked so hard to get loaded, put on a ship and sent over to Sri Lanka is there. They are unloading it and getting the supplies to those folk who need them. This is just so exciting to be able to see the container being used for what it was intended for.

The Good...and the Bad

So last night was our regularly scheduled Real Time Podcast. We had a fantastic interview that was just fascinating with Spike. He tells a very interesting story of he and his wife's journey that is fantastic. The bad part was the hardware did not want to cooperate. There's all sorts of hardware we use to make the podcast sound as professional as possible including a sound board, dynamic microphones for all, headsets and the heart and soul is a digital audio recorder. The sound board pooped out on us last night...constantly. So I'd shut it down, give it a sec, fire back up for five minutes of good audio then it'd blow up again. The other down side was every start and stop takes up more space on the DAR which caused it to fill up, so I put in the other card which promptly filled up so I put in the tiny little bitty card that it came with for the final five minutes of the show. I have like 8-10 segments to piece together to try and make something that sounds halfway decent out of this...ugh!

We are all The Church

Every one of us that claim to be Jesus-followers make up His church. It is not only those in the church with a title or who serve in a leadership position, but all of us that make up The Church. Now many of you may say

I know that

but my question is are you really living that? Would somebody looking at your life from the outside see that you know that you are part of Christ's church?

I want to talk about just one gathering of Jesus-followers that I'm a part of, namely RCC. We meet each Sunday in the Provo Towne Center Cinemark Theaters where we worship in song, through scripture reading and with a relevant message. At the conclusion of each worship experience, I present the opportunity to respond to the worship experience in many different ways...you can respond to the overall experience, you can get involved, you can turn in a prayer request or with your financial contributions. Then each week a lot of people decide to play games.

It's as if a lot of people believe this entire worship experience was somehow shaped just for them. If you have been attending RCC for more than six weeks, it no longer is all about you! Our goal is to reach out to folk that are not attending a church anywhere for whatever their reasons. We want to provide a place where they can come and experience God in a new and unique way. Then we want to make it possible for everyone to continue to mature in their spiritual journey. That means doing the work of The Church.

I chose six weeks arbitrarily. I don't know how many weeks a person needs to attend before they decide this is the gathering of Jesus-followers they begin to consider home. That may be two weeks for some and may be eight weeks for others. The point is, at some time a decision must be made. Either you decide to associate with this group or you do not. Some people want to go a year or two before making a decision because they were hurt at their last church or they were abused at their last place or they have deep scars from the last group they associated with. That's unfair to us. God has blessed each and every one of us with 168 hours a week and different gifts and talents that we all need to share. And by not sharing, you are hurting this group of Jesus-followers.

Now a lot of people then go on to say that they are not staff at the church and they don't want to be sucked into some never-ending volunteer position where they can't get out. Let me address these in order. I am staff at the church...at least my picture shows up under the staff page on the web site. But that doesn't change anything. I do not receive a paycheck for all the work I do at church. My motivation is not getting paid at the end of the week, my motivation is using the time and talents God has given to me in a way that pleases Him. I think too many people are motivated by money rather than just the raw idea of pleasing their Heavenly Father. I have the same 168 hours a week as every other human has been given, and during that time I am able to hold down a full time job as a software engineer, I run a small farm in Benjamin, I continue to raise three great children, I am a husband to my wife and I find opportunity to serve God with my interaction with people and working for RCC. If you are a Jesus-follower, you need to be working to help out your local gathering.

Now some people don't want to be stuck in a never-ending volunteer position they can never get out of. I say good! I don't want to keep people in positions they don't want to be in! I give every volunteer the same speech...treat this like a job, please. You have two weeks of probation where you can cut and run at any time with no regrets. Once you've done a job for two weeks, if I find your work satisfactory and you are happy with the work, you are hired. All I ask for on the back side is two weeks notice so we can try and find somebody to take your spot. There are a ton of folk who have come in, tried it, spent some time doing a job and quit. They did it right, found another position they preferred and are now serving there. No permanent volunteer positions and no guilt. I don't want to guilt folk into positions and serving, but I do want to make opportunities to serve available to everyone who wants to serve.

Sorry for the long post, but I needed to get this out. It is about time people stop coming in to church for an hour, complaining that it didn't feed them or take care of their spiritual needs and come back the next week to repeat the process. Being a Jesus-follower is about service. Jesus modeled servanthood with His time on this earth. It is about time those of us who claim to follow Him wrap a towel around our waists and get to work washing feet rather than complaining our feet are still dirty!

Goodbye, Uncle Ray

I started working at Novell on October 30, 1992. When I began working there, we had four buildings on our Provo campus and you could pretty much at least recognize almost everybody working there. I started out as a building technician who ran around helping folks with problems they had with their desktop computers. My expertise was in MacIntosh since I was a repair person for those computers and that was my focus...keeping the Macs working with everything else.

When I began working was right towards the end of Novell's small-business atmosphere. When I started, Ray Noorda (Uncle Ray) still went around to new hires and introduced himself. That ended right around the time I started, but Uncle Ray worked very hard to promote this company as one big family.

A lot of people just see him as a successful businessman, but Ray Noorda did a lot more than that. Because he was a man of integrity and he ran Novell with integrity, there are a lot of folk living in Utah County today with mortgages paid off because of the work they were able to do at Novell.

Because of the way he ran Novell, I found myself able to move from building technician to server operator over to tech support through three levels there and then move over to engineering where now I'm a Senior Software Engineer on the NetWare Core OS. All of that is at least partially owed to Ray for the way he structured Novell and his thought that anybody can do it if they just try hard enough. And he rewarded hard work.

Now, after a fight against alzheimers he has passed away. We'll miss you, Ray. Thanks for the opportunities you made available to me and my family.

Hello, my name is Tom and I'm a BSG-aholic

I tell you, I am addicted to Battlestar Galactica now! I have been anxiously awaiting the season premiere on 6 October to air. My friend got me addicted to this show, and I've enjoyed both seasons 1 and 2 on iTunes and he assured me that season 3 would be available the next day. It wasn't! I've been watching iTunes every day (sometimes twice) and it still has not appeared. I'm totally jonesing for my BSG fix!

Things are coming together!

Man, this has been a journey! We've had the vidoe mixer for about 10 months now and we finally are getting it to do what it was supposed to do at the start. The thing took a long time to understand and finally figure out even after watching the video about it a couple of times, but today we finally were able to display words over live video and make it look good. Now it doesn't look great, but I am so happy with how far we have come in under a year. There's still some hardware I'm looking at, and we need more lights and some communication systems for the production crew, but my crew is coming together. We are beginning to find our various lanes and stick in them and do our very best at each of our jobs. This is great!

Finally...I'm caught up!

Wow! After a marathon session sitting here at the computer nerding out I finally am caught up on everything!

I have Pastor Dean's audio blog updated with the 1 October blog (clicky)
I have the message podcast updated with the 1 October message (clicky)
I have updated the CG host & facilitator podcast, Spike Speaks with the latest (click here)
and I finally have Real Time updated with episode 3 (clicky clicky) This one definitely takes me the longest time. First off, it is draining just doing the podcast! It takes time beforehand doing show prep and being ready, then I usually end up with a wave file around 500M in size. That is imported, then blended with the intro and outro music and in the case of episode 3 it had to have the Doing Your Duty wave file in there as well, so I ended up with intro music, before the Duty segment, then the Duty segment, then the after segment talk then the outro music. Getting the timing right and the volumes all right, I then compressed the whole mess and exported to mp3. That was about an hour long process to render the final file.

But I'm done now! WHOO HOO! Until tomorrow when I get home around noon, I am finally up to date with podcasts and messages and stuff...whew!

Trying to catch up

I have been just swamped this week!

Sunday was such a fun day. Even with the production opportunities that occurred, I just had a great time being able to talk about Proverbs 15. I've heard a couple of different folk with feedback, and it's very interesting to hear what people really took away from the message. For me, the most important idea was that nobody is insignificant to God, and the article on Colonel Petrov really reinforced that for me. But I've heart of folk who were convicted of tithing from the message. They had been putting in nearly a tithe for years, but after Sunday's message, they decided to get serious about following Jesus and give a full tithe. I've also heard from people the idea that it's time to stop playing games and start getting busy was the biggest for them. Just fun to hear the various things people take away from a message.

I'll get it posted very soon! Tonight is the next Real Time podcast and we will have an in-studio guest for tonight. Also, a different live audience will be visiting, so that is going to be some fun tonight. No hints here, you'll have to listen in.

Neat morning

Last night was a storm here in Benjamin. Around 10pm it dumped about 1/3" of rain in around 30 minutes...it just poured down! Wind gusts were up to 30 mph and with the rain and lightning things were jumping! So I woke up this morning and looked North over the pasture and there was a mist in the air...maybe 15' high is all...slightly lit up by the sun coming up over the mountains. It was an incredible sight...and, no, I didn't get a shot with my camera. :-(